Deployed software systems (software applications, modules, groupings of applications or modules, etc.) are typically accompanied by documentation that provides information about the associated software systems to a requesting user. For example, documentation accompanying a given software application may include help content, application operating specifications and data, software development instructions and/or functionality, and the like. Such application documentation is typically supplied with the software system by the original developer of the system. When a software system is customized by one or more third parties, or when documentation content is available for various contexts (for example, multiple user language contexts), problems providing requested documentation content may occur. For example, if a third party software contributor (e.g., software developer/publisher) customizes an application to add customized functions, help content accompanying the customization may overwrite original help content accompanying the pre-customization version of the application. Thus, while a subsequent requesting user may have access to help content associated with the customization, he/she may not have access to help content for other non-customized features of the application.
Completely documenting a multi-layered software system that is produced by multiple independent parties requires a similar approach for describing and documenting the capabilities of the system. Currently, such software system documentation is not designed in a multi-layered architecture. For example, when a user makes a request for help content with context (e.g., help content in German), contextual information from the software system documentation is static and singular. That is, in most help or information systems, the link from context information to system documentation is static and singular whereby the context information is predetermined and is not based on information parsed from all available documentation content associated with the system. In such systems, a user requesting help content may be provided a single topic containing partial help content, and may not be given a choice from multiple pieces of content. Thus, a problem may occur with current online software system documentation in a multi-layered system because it may be difficult to determine which piece of documentation to reference in response to a given documentation request, for example, base documentation provided with the original software system versus documentation accompanying customizations or other modifications provided by a third party contributor.
It is with respect to these and other considerations that the present invention has been made.